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Antarctic ice extended direct greenhouse-gas measurements to three million years ago

Discontinuous Allan Hills ice snapshots spanning about 3.1 to 0.5 million years ago showed no marked mean methane change and an approximately 20-ppm carbon-dioxide decline from 2.9 to 1.2 million years ago, followed by values stable within about 10 ppm across the mid-Pleistocene transition. Corrected 2.8- to 3.1-million-year samples yielded mean CO2 of 250 plus or minus 10 ppm.

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Stable ID
science-2026-three-million-year-ice-greenhouse-gases
Revision
science-2026-three-million-year-ice-greenhouse-gases.v1
Field
Earth Science · Palaeoclimate
Evidence
Tier 1 · Peer reviewed: Yes
Record state
Current · Peer-reviewed; author correction incorporated
Last checked

AI role

No substantive AI role was reported.

Record details

Problem or result
Direct measurements of ancient atmospheric gases from ice had not previously reached far enough into the late Pliocene to constrain greenhouse-gas history over three million years.
Authors
Julia Marks-Peterson, Sarah Shackleton, John Higgins et al.
Institutions
Oregon State University-led COLDEX collaboration with Woods Hole, Princeton, Scripps/UC San Diego, Tongji, Maine, UC Santa Barbara and Shanghai Jiao Tong
Result date
March 18, 2026

Why it matters

Ancient air trapped in ice provides a more direct atmospheric measurement than many proxies and opens a new observational window on long-term climate evolution.

Limits

These are discontinuous blue-ice snapshots, not a continuous three-million-year core. Post-depositional effects and accumulation assumptions complicate interpretation, and the findings do not imply that today's rapid anthropogenic CO2 rise is harmless.

Sources

  1. Primary: Nature primary paper
  2. Primary: Author correction
  3. Primary: Public data
  4. Independent: Nature News and Views

Correction and revision history

  1. 2026-03-18 — Greenhouse-gas snapshot record published in Nature.
  2. 2026-04-29 — Author correction published and incorporated into the tracker summary.

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